A blog for Small Business Consultants and the vendors who serve them. It contains Opinions on business success, News in the SMB consulting space, and Information on what I'm up to.All material Copyright (c) 2006-2015 by Karl W. Palachuk unless otherwise noted.

Nestled deep in the dark woods of Washington state, in a cold and forbidding building at the top of a mountain, you'll find the home of the Microsoft Department of Scheming (DOS).

And in the Department of Scheming there is large office with tall, steel windows. There you will find a man dressed all in black, in a large captain's chair, petting a cat. He is chuckling to himself. Because, in addition to being the Vice President of Scheming, he is also a mole placed inside of Microsoft by a coalition that plans to destroy Microsoft from the inside.

This coalition consists of Google (the founding organization), Linux, Open Source, and Yahoo. Together they are known as GLOSY.

The logic behind their plan goes like this:

1) Microsoft Office, as it exists today, is an unstoppable force.

Office is not successful because of it's feature set. Wordpad does 98% of what 98% of the population will ever need to do with word processing. Wordperfect and Open Office do 100% of what 99.9% of the population will ever do with office products. Even Google Docs and Spreadsheets does a pretty good job.

So why are businesses willing to pay $400 or $500 for a copy of Microsoft Office? Because MS owns the mind share. Everyone uses MS Office. The only worries are about compatibility. The only concerns are about exchanging documents with ease.

Having another brand that's "compatible" isn't the same. MS Office just is the standard and it just works.

2) For competition to gain a significant share of this market, Microsoft will have to open the door to competition. There are really only two ways to do this. First, they can adopt a file format that is easily opened by any program and saved seamlessly. If business owners can be convinced that any office system can open any file from any other office system, then Microsoft's dominance can be assailed.

Action Item: Get Microsoft to move to .xml file formats.

Second, if biz owners can be convinced that they don't need to "buy" the software, then they can use it on a month-to-month basis and always have the latest features. If this mindset prevails, it will be easy to provide cheaper alternatives that "just work." One month, a business owner will use a non-Microsoft product and it will just work. If the coalition is good at marketing, business owners won't even know that they're not using a Microsoft product. Once this happens, it's a commodity market.

Action Item: Get Microsoft to offer office products over the internet for a subscription fee.

3) The greatest challenge to making all of this happen over the internet is the realiability of the internet connection. The second greatest challenge is to provide adequate customer support during the important transition phase. For Microsoft's online software service to work, they need to choose the right partner. GLOSY must do whatever is necessary to make sure Microsoft chooses poorly here.

Action Item: Get Microsoft to partner with an unreliable cable company whose customer service reputation is among the worst in modern memory.

4) Changing the business owners' mindset will take time. Years. They will need to see a variety of examples where online document handling works. Once they use Wordpress (whether they know it or not) and other online editing tools, their mindset will begin to shift. The explosion of blogging should help considerably on this front.

The industry must go through a period of confusion. At the end of it, business owners will go to a web site, edit a document, send it to a colleague, and never know what program they used.

Time and confusion can only be had if Microsoft agrees to the action items above. These will result in a 1- or 2-year period in which customers won't "get" what's happening to them, Microsoft's delivery will suck out loud, and the GLOSY community will be able to go through at least two generations of products.

By the time Microsoft figures out how to deliver their products in sufficient quantity and quality to deserve a piece of this market, they will no longer dominate the market.

Translate

Newly Released / Newly Revised!

This four-volume set is the definitive guide to Managed Services. From the front office to the tech department, we cover it all. Every computer consultant, every managed service provider, every technical consulting company - every successful business - needs SOPs!

When you document your processes and procedures, you design a way for your company to have repeatable success. And as you fine-tune those processes and procedures, you become more successful, more efficient, and more profitable. The way you do everything is your brand.

How to Deliver Successful, Profitable Projects on Time with Your Small Business Clients

Small Business project management is simply not as complicated as project management in the enterprise. But small business projects have the same challenges as enterprise projects: They need to achieve their goals effectively, on time, and within budget.

They also face the same primary challenge – staying inside the scope of the project!

This great little book provides a simple process project planning and management process that is easy to learn and easy to teach to your employees, fellow technicians, and sub-contractors. You’ll learn to track any project, explain all the stages to clients and employees, and verify that everything is completed on time and under budget.

The authors show you a great technique for making sure that scope creep is a thing of the past! Make every project a successful and profitable project!

The last several SOP Fridays have been about your ticketing system or PSA (professional services automation) system. This week we'll ta...

FTC Disclosure Statement

I make every attempt to honestly state what I believe and enjoy the freedom of posting whatever I feel like on this blog. This is a big complicated world and I have many interconnected personal and professional relationships.

I may in some way receive money or other benefits from any of the products, services, or companies mentioned in this blog as a direct or indirect result of my actions on and off this blog. Any experience mentioned here is just my experience and I have no knowledge about whether it represents a typical experience with any products, services, or companies mentioned.

Whenever it is possible to have both an honest and a misleading interpretation of my statements, please assume honesty. Thanks. - karlp